How very American it was to assume that these unsmiling Chinese would be pleased if one showed a preference for their native implements...How very American it was to feel somehow guilty unless one struggled over rice noodles and lumps of meat with things that looked like enlarged knitting needles. (Tom Wolfe, "The Bonfire of the Vanities")
Like more than one Englishman in New York, he looked upon Americans as hopeless children whom Providence had perversely provided with this great swollen fat fowl of a continent. Any way one chose to relieve them of their riches, short of violence, was sporting, if not morally justifiable, since they would only squander it in some tasteless and useless fashion, in any event. (Tom Wolfe, "The Bonfire of the Vanities")
The Yanks always wore neckties that leapt out in front of their shirts, as if to announce the awkwardness to follow. (Tom Wolfe, "The Bonfire of the Vanities")
worked so far out beyond the frontiers of conventional studio art that they have no names themselves for the forms they create. (Tom Wolfe)
A liberal is a conservative who has been arrested. (Tom Wolfe)
The New York Times bestseller list only has four categories. There ought to be a fifth category for autobiography. Or perhaps we should call it handicapped nonfiction. (Tom Wolfe)
We really believe that we can continue to separate ourselves as a company and deliver a different level of service by being closer to our dealers in the marketplaces. (Tom Wolfe)
This beach is verboten for people practically 50 years old, (Tom Wolfe)
It taught me a lesson, ... You can be denounced from the heavens, and it only makes people interested. (Tom Wolfe)
The Me Decade and the Third Great Awakening. (Tom Wolfe)
He is politically a real maverick. It's very idiosyncratic, and I mean that in a good way. (Tom Wolfe)
Stone was the most prominent architect in America, and he decided that the modernist movement in architecture -- in other words, the parade of glass boxes that marched across America -- had become exhausted, not worth pursuing anymore, (Tom Wolfe)
To a man of sixty... one of the grimmest reminders of the Reaper's approach comes when his doctors, the people who have attended to his body for decades, begin retiring on him... or dying on him... or both. (Tom Wolfe)
The term most people use to describe Lewis is patrician, and he does have that air. He's very much part of a social network. He does know a wide range of people in the upper orders. That's why I think he has a lot of fun with his left-leaning views. (Tom Wolfe)
We are always acting on what has just finished happening. It happened at least 1/30th of a second ago. We think we're in the present, but we aren't. The present we know is only a movie of the past. (Tom Wolfe)